Rushing
by The Painted Lady
Summary: Summary: One shot. Caught and imprisoned by orcs, a Rohirric woman’s courage is tested…to the limits.


Title: Rushing

Author: The Painted Lady

Disclaimer: The landscape of Middle Earth and all its characters belong to Tolkien.

Summary: One shot. Caught and imprisoned by orcs, a Rohirric woman's courage is tested…to the limits.

It had been two days since the attack. Una had been out in the fields, preparing what was left of the harvest when the Orcs came. Being far out of earshot of her family's small village, the only warning she had was a quick glance towards the stables, only to see them alight with flames. An entire hamlet, destroyed by the raging fires of Saruman's Uruk Hai. There was no escape for her.

In the days that followed, the demon spawn brought her forth to Isengard. Una, being a farmer's daughter, knew the dangers that the orcs presented to the livelihood of the Riddermark, and she had heard the tales from older villagers of the violence that befell people, especially women, who fell into the hands of the evil minions. She was not to be spared.

The orcs led her, none to gently, to a cell that was little more than a cave in the burning infernos that lay below the black tower. There she was tied with chains to suffer indignities that no living being should have to endure. But she would not scream, would not give her captures the satisfaction of hearing her pain. That made it all the worse for her.

The captain of the foul guard found her pleasing, and it became his task to break her spirit. Every night he would visit her in her dark chamber and do things unspeakable. But no sound came from her dry, parched lips, making him all the more angry and violent with her.

Then came the day when Una awoke to silence. There was no pounding of the smithies below in the hellhole, no heavy footsteps of the orcs who patrolled the corridors, no yells or loud quarrels that the Uruk Hai were so fond of engaging in. Then, a terrible roar was heard from the surface. It traveled through the rock of her dim cage and into her very bones. Shivering, she stood and strained to see out of the doorway. From her vantage point in the depth of the furnace, she could see the tips of spears. A great many spears, to be precise. Una pulled at her restraints until her wrists bled, thinking this her chance to escape the hell she had endured, but it was to no avail. The sound of a great host beating on their shields and stomping out of the fortification faded into the night and all was quiet once again.

Despair took her. It was then, when no being was within a moderate distance that she let herself succumb to her tears. Her cries and shouts of anguish and rage were heard only by the black stone that surrounded her.

After a time, when her misery had drained itself, she heard a new sound. This was entirely new, foreign to her prison. The sound of a great many rocks being sundered from the earth was issuing forth from the surface of Isengard. There was no being that she knew of that had the kind of strength to plunder the ground of its quarry except the very power of the earth itself. An earthquake, she thought. She would indeed die here in the fetid depths of orc filth.

Glancing up towards the sky to get a final look at the heavens before her demise, she saw the oddest thing. There was a tree in her line of sight that was moving. Moving? Squinting to block out the smoke from the fires, she saw that, indeed, the tree was not just swaying, but walking, throwing, smashing, and hacking at the doors to the fortress. She smiled a grim smile. Saruman would pay for all his deeds; it seemed that the very earth itself was rising up against him.

And yet a new sound made its presence known. It started as a dull roar, so low that she barely heard it. Then, as it increased in its volume, a white froth washed over the side of the pit and with it, the remains of orcs and their foulness. It was water! A true smile graced Una's face as she watched her captures fall to their deaths.

This smile was soon replaced with a frown of realization. The water hadn't stopped, and it was filling the abyss. She closed her eyes, sending a silent plea to whatever Gods were listening. She could hear the rushing sound of the fierce river climbing higher, it was right below her level! Opening her eyes a final time, resigned, she let the water take her. Her last grim thought on the plane of Middle Earth was, "I never let them hear me scream."


End file.
